A few minutes after midnight between Thursday and Friday, the first freight train of MAV Railtours departed on the new Budapest-Belgrade line, confirmed Zsolt Hegyi, CEO of Hungarian Railways (MAV Group), in a post on his Facebook profile.
The CEO of MAV Group wrote on Facebook that this marked the end not only of the period of construction of the line and development of infrastructure, but also of the closed testing phase. He added that the renovated railway line No. 150 was now being tested in real conditions with daily freight traffic, before passenger traffic returned to it.
He also stated that all measurements and test runs had shown that the line met all the infrastructure and safety requirements required for freight train traffic.
As he stated, the renovation of line 150 represents the largest railway investment in Hungary in recent years: instead of the old, poor-quality single-track line 160 kilometers long, which runs from Ferencvaros to the Hungarian-Serbian border station at Kelebija, a double-track line was built along the entire route, which can operate at speeds of up to 160 km/h, with state-of-the-art passenger facilities.
The first train to pass was a freight train from the MAV Railtours company, a few minutes after midnight, and at the head of the train was a Siemens Vectron locomotive, which had arrived as part of the locomotive renovation program.
